Our favorite kind of Christmas craft every year is making Christmas ornaments. These are particularly good, because they’re so keepable, unlike pictures and other paper crafts, which often get wrinkled or torn and have to be thrown away. Over the last few years, we’ve made many different ornaments, some variations on the same theme, but all of them different in some way. They also make great Christmas gifts for special people like grandparents, pastors, and Sunday School teachers!

We’ve done very basic candy cane and wreath ornaments with beads on pipe cleaners…I think every child in America has made one of these at some point!

Glitter ornaments are another standard, and they look so pretty in the lights on the tree:

Pipe cleaners are useful in so many ways…these came from a pattern I found in a book about Christmas during World War II. Super easy, but the metallic stems make them so sparkly and pretty on the tree!

We’ve made a lot of stars/snowflakes…it can be difficult to tell the difference! Some have come from craft kits, and some are simply done following a pattern, and strung on wire or pipe cleaners.

We’ve made other things from kits, too, including one attempt at foam. I really don’t care for foam projects in general, but the penguins we made did turn out really cute!

This year, for something new, we made wreath ornaments using buttons. For some reason, the buttons, as opposed to the beads used in years past, were particularly entertaining to the children!

We’ve also made ornaments using bells:

We even made jointed Nutcracker ornaments. These look really cool, but due to some, uh…teacher error…they didn’t turn out quite as planned. They’re still fun, though, and they’re even posable! Turkey designed his to look like the San Francisco Ballet’s Nutcracker Prince.

Of course, sometimes it’s fun to let children design and create their own ornaments, too!

Next year, I want to make jingle bell ornaments, glitter ball ornaments, and maybe a paper ball ornament, (even though I was terrible at making those as a child!), but after that, I’m out of ideas! That’s OK, though, because other than this year’s wreath, Ladybug hasn’t made any of the other ornaments, so I can just start the whole cycle over again with her!